‘Improving Sensory Environments: A Practical Guide to Person-Centred Healthcare Settings’ provides tools that support healthcare teams to improve sensory environments.
There is now a wealth of evidence showing the importance of the senses in healthcare environments, but there is little guidance available for people who want to make positive change. This resource offers you routes to meaningful change.
You don’t need to be a trained design professional to achieve good sensory design. There is much that can be improved within your timeframe, budget or other limitations to make positive change for future users of a healthcare setting. This resource provides a variety of tools for improving the physical and sensory environment.
You will find this resource useful if you are seeking new ways to engage in a more sensory approach to your work. You may wish to use it if you are planning a new project as an architect, a hospital arts co-ordinator, or a designer. This guide may also be useful if you want to improve an existing environment, or to gather evidence to advocate for change. You may be working in a hospital in any role to do so, for example as part of estates or planning team, or as a member of healthcare staff.
You can access this guide in a number of ways:
- You can download the full online guide as a PDF, for printing or consultation, HERE.
- You can find each individual section of the guide, as separate PDFs for ease of consultation or download, HERE.
- You can access A5 activity cards HERE. If you do this, we recommend that you consult the full guide first, because it contains important information about how to set up and run activities, ethical considerations, and more.
- Vind HIER een Nederlandse vertaling van deze gids (You can download a translated version of the guide in Dutch here!)
- For online versions of the mapping and collage activities, click HERE
The design of this resource was funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, Sensing Spaces of Healthcare: Rethinking the NHS Hospital (MR/S033793/1). It is shared under a CC BY-NC licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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